Gone Surfing

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string(19) "2014-01-19 05:47:38"
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string(5248) "Over the last few months I have begun to hear the phrase “oh he is very time poor at the moment”. Now for me saying “time poor” is using two words instead of one, you could replace “time poor” with busy, disorganised, inefficient and the list goes on.
So that made me think why are people busier now than they used to be? Is it because we are using two words instead of one, are we creating extra work for ourselves and overcomplicating everything to give the appearance of busyness?
I sit in an open plan office as most professionals tend to do these days and it is quite interesting to observe the amount of busyness that replaces business in the modern work environment.
Technology is supposed to make life easier. It is supposed to save us time. Yet, between email, web-surfing, and games, we fritter away much of our time.
A recent survey showed that the office based professionals spend an average of 23 hours a week online. What could you accomplish if you could reclaim even a portion of that time each week? Probably quite a bit!
How to Reduce Your Tech Time
We used to have very few interruptions in the workplace, you know back in the dark ages pre internet and while I risk sounding like a Neanderthal people were a lot more productive as there were fewer distractions.
I remember my first office job was before mobile phones and the only things on our computers was an intranet rather than the internet. Sounds boring but in reality the only way to distract yourself from work was to talk to your colleagues or read a newspaper and neither of those things took very long.
These days our offices have high speed internet connections, we all have smart phones and many people have tablets too. So for anyone looking for a distraction they can now, email, message, text, blog, video call/face time and chat while sitting at their desk and that is only the list of ways to communicate with others and add to that the ability to spend time surfing the web for gifts, holidays, clothes etc or watching YouTube or Vevo.
What we all need to realise is that endlessly surfing the web or communicating with your social networks isn’t going to get your goals done. Nor is it going to magically make you successful. So, reduce your endless surfing and get more done. At the end of the day we need to make more time to achieve our goals and as a former CEO of Coca Cola said:

“Work efficiently during office hours and leave on time, give the required time to your family, friends and have a proper rest”

Here are 5 ways to assist you with the battle of being busy:
1. Unplug from the Internet
When you really need to get work done without interruptions… turn off the Internet. Literally unplug. Use “airplane mode” on your phone. Whatever it takes. If you need a more elegant solution, there are software apps that will let you block specific websites for a specified amount of time. (For example, it blocks news, Facebook, Twitter… yet still lets you do your work, research, etc.)
2. Resist the Urge to Look It Up
These days, information is only a click or web search away. But, do you really need to know the answer to every bit of trivia that pops up in the course of your day. Resist the urge to immediately look everything up on Wikipedia. That one search could end up costing you hours of time.
3. Save Articles for Later
When you are surfing the web it can be tempting to keep reading each related and linked article. A great technique to stop this is to save “other” articles for reading later. Use an app like Pocket to save those articles. This allows you to save important information while preventing you from endlessly reading now.
Interestingly, you will often find that when go through your saved queue that you clear out many articles without reading. In other words, upon later reflection they weren’t worth the time in the first place.
4. Set a Timer
If you must search the Internet, set a time limit on your web adventure. Better yet, set an actual timer. This puts a boundary on your surfing. Or at a minimum it will snap you out of your web-induced daze when it starts chiming.
5. Limit Texting & Online Chat
Don’t spend your core business time on frivolous text or messaging conversations about what to have for dinner or what bar to go to later on, we all used to be able to agree a time, location and date for our social catch ups, dates, events and general social lives with 24 hours’ notice and we didn’t need to be consistently in each other pockets 24/7.
Technology is a powerful ally in the modern world. It allows us to instantly find information and solutions to many problems and puts us within reach of everyone that we need all the time. However, it can also be a big time waster. One web search can lead down a path of hours of wasted time. So, put down the mouse, smartphone, or tablet… and get some work done instead.
Cox Purtell Recruitment Agency Blog / Sydney / Melbourne / Adelaide"
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Over the last few months I have begun to hear the phrase “oh he is very time poor at the moment”. Now for me saying “time poor” is using two words instead of one, you could replace “time poor” with busy, disorganised, inefficient and the list goes on.

So that made me think why are people busier now than they used to be? Is it because we are using two words instead of one, are we creating extra work for ourselves and overcomplicating everything to give the appearance of busyness?

I sit in an open plan office as most professionals tend to do these days and it is quite interesting to observe the amount of busyness that replaces business in the modern work environment.

Technology is supposed to make life easier. It is supposed to save us time. Yet, between email, web-surfing, and games, we fritter away much of our time.

A recent survey showed that the office based professionals spend an average of 23 hours a week online. What could you accomplish if you could reclaim even a portion of that time each week? Probably quite a bit!

How to Reduce Your Tech Time

We used to have very few interruptions in the workplace, you know back in the dark ages pre internet and while I risk sounding like a Neanderthal people were a lot more productive as there were fewer distractions.

I remember my first office job was before mobile phones and the only things on our computers was an intranet rather than the internet. Sounds boring but in reality the only way to distract yourself from work was to talk to your colleagues or read a newspaper and neither of those things took very long.

These days our offices have high speed internet connections, we all have smart phones and many people have tablets too. So for anyone looking for a distraction they can now, email, message, text, blog, video call/face time and chat while sitting at their desk and that is only the list of ways to communicate with others and add to that the ability to spend time surfing the web for gifts, holidays, clothes etc or watching YouTube or Vevo.

What we all need to realise is that endlessly surfing the web or communicating with your social networks isn’t going to get your goals done. Nor is it going to magically make you successful. So, reduce your endless surfing and get more done. At the end of the day we need to make more time to achieve our goals and as a former CEO of Coca Cola said:

“Work efficiently during office hours and leave on time, give the required time to your family, friends and have a proper rest”

Here are 5 ways to assist you with the battle of being busy:

1. Unplug from the Internet

When you really need to get work done without interruptions… turn off the Internet. Literally unplug. Use “airplane mode” on your phone. Whatever it takes. If you need a more elegant solution, there are software apps that will let you block specific websites for a specified amount of time. (For example, it blocks news, Facebook, Twitter… yet still lets you do your work, research, etc.)

2. Resist the Urge to Look It Up

These days, information is only a click or web search away. But, do you really need to know the answer to every bit of trivia that pops up in the course of your day. Resist the urge to immediately look everything up on Wikipedia. That one search could end up costing you hours of time.

3. Save Articles for Later

When you are surfing the web it can be tempting to keep reading each related and linked article. A great technique to stop this is to save “other” articles for reading later. Use an app like Pocket to save those articles. This allows you to save important information while preventing you from endlessly reading now.

Interestingly, you will often find that when go through your saved queue that you clear out many articles without reading. In other words, upon later reflection they weren’t worth the time in the first place.

4. Set a Timer

If you must search the Internet, set a time limit on your web adventure. Better yet, set an actual timer. This puts a boundary on your surfing. Or at a minimum it will snap you out of your web-induced daze when it starts chiming.

5. Limit Texting & Online Chat

Don’t spend your core business time on frivolous text or messaging conversations about what to have for dinner or what bar to go to later on, we all used to be able to agree a time, location and date for our social catch ups, dates, events and general social lives with 24 hours’ notice and we didn’t need to be consistently in each other pockets 24/7.

Technology is a powerful ally in the modern world. It allows us to instantly find information and solutions to many problems and puts us within reach of everyone that we need all the time. However, it can also be a big time waster. One web search can lead down a path of hours of wasted time. So, put down the mouse, smartphone, or tablet… and get some work done instead.